Austin-based
indie filmmaker Richard Linklater ("A Scanner
Darkly"/"Before Sunset"/"Me and Orson Welles")returns to Texas to
film this very funny and poignant true story about a
generous popular people person, the thirty-something
assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Jack Black).
It tells of the true Christian or con man's doomed
relationship with a wealthy, nasty, elderly widow named Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). They're from the close-knit
religious rural East Texas small-town of Carthage.The slight story, told like
a mock documentary, relying on a one-note plot it
repeats over and over, is blessed with a great
performance by Black, a playful screenplay by
Linklater and Skip
Hollandsworth, and direction of the docudrama that makes the
most of black comedy. The amusing tale of the rise and
fall of the lovable and always cheerful Bernie, who
loves dressing up the dead so they look their best
when laid to rest, was discovered by Linklater in a1998 Texas Monthly
article--"Midnight in the Garden of East Texas"--
written by Hollandsworth.
It mentions that in the summer of 1997,
40-year-old Bernie Tiede was arrested for the murder
the previous year of 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, a
multimillionaire heiress with whom he had been sharing
living quarters.

Marjorie is hated by her estranged
family (no relative has seen her in the last four
years) and by everyone in town, and by her unkind
actions as a banker gets more hate when she runs the
bank she inherited from hubby by disrespecting the
locals and not being helpful in their securing of
loans. The isolated widow is befriended by the
kind-hearted, effeminate and perhaps true Christian
believer Bernie and begins a serious relationship with
him, as they take expensive vacations together in spas
around the world. But the closer Bernie gets to Marjorie, the more demanding and
possessive she becomes. Eventually her tight grip on
the mortician begins to wear on him, and while now
employed to be her business agent, valet and toy boy,
he loses his marbles one day and in a rage shoots his
mean-spirited meal ticket in the back four times with
a rifle and stuffs her body in her freezer. Not found
for nine months, as Bernie tells everyone she had a
stroke and is in an out-of-state nursing home. But her
suspicious stockbroker (Richard Robichaux) talks the sheriff
(Brandon Smith) into getting a search warrant of her
home. After the body is recovered, the sheriff gets
a tearful confession from Bernie and the shrewd
showboating district attorney, Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), realizes he can't get a
conviction in Carthage, where folks are willing to
forgive the sociable nice guy Bernie, and instead he
gets the judge to move the trial to a town fifty miles
away. There Bernie is convicted of first degree murder
and is given a life sentence.

Linklater takes pot shots
at the town for universally loving the murderer Bernie
and universally hating the victim, but is
not interested in exploring any depths to the
psychology of the either gay or straight murderer.

It's
interesting to note, many of the real residents ofCarthage are
interviewed during the story and serve as a Greek
chorus sharing their similar good feelings about the
energetic Bernie. They tell us that he sang in the
church choir, acted in the community theater, and the
goody-goody ran fairs to support the arts, and when he got his hands on
the widow's money donated it to build a wing for the Methodist
church, provided generous loans to local businesses
and homeowners who fell behind in mortgage payments,
and donated new cars to the needy.